Table Of ContentEoin Colfer
Douglas Adams’s
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Part Six of Three
And Another Thing…
For Jackie, Finn, and Seán, who miss me when I am away, but not as
much as I miss them. If you want to remind yourselves what I look like,
there should be a picture of me at the back of this book.
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was
now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And
another thing…” twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the
argument.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
We have travelled through space and time, my friends, to rock
this house again.
TENACIOUS D
Contents
Epigraph
And Another Thing…
If you own a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to…
Chapter 1
According to a janitor’s assistant at the Maximegalon University, who…
Chapter 2
Ford Prefect explored the room of sky, breathing on the…
Chapter 3
The Tricia McMillan who was native to this Earth, and…
Chapter 4
Planetary catastrophes are no big deal. They happen all the…
Chapter 5
Anything can be real. Every imaginable thing is happening somewhere…
Chapter 6
Far out in the fringes of the Dark Nebula of…
Chapter 7
Wowbagger’s ship red-shifted from the real universe into the mysterious…
Chapter 8
Ford Prefect was also heading toward a beer moment. The…
Chapter 9
Bowerick Wowbagger’s longship slipped out of dark space like an…
Chapter 10
The word went out to the sentient beings of Nano…
Chapter 11
Hyperspace cleared its throat and hawked out a Vogon bureaucruiser…
Chapter 12
There is no such thing as a happy ending. Every…
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Eoin Colfer
Copyright
AND ANOTHER THING…
EOIN COLFER
If you own a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then one of the last
things you would be likely to type into its v-board would be the very same title
of that particular Sub-Etha volume. As presumably, since you have a copy, you
already know all about the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great
publishing corporations of Ursa Minor. However, presumption has been the
runner-up in every major Causes of Intergalactic Conflict poll for the past few
millennia. First place invariably going to “land-grabbing bastards with big
weapons,” and third usually being a toss-up between “coveting another sentient
being’s significant other” and “misinterpretation of simple hand gestures.” One
man’s Wow! This pasta is fantastico is another’s Your momma plays it fast and
loose with sailors.
Let us say, for example, that you are on an eight-hour layover in Port Brasta
without enough credit on your implant for a Gargle Blaster, and if upon realizing
that you know almost nothing about this supposedly wonderful book you hold in
your hands, you decide out of sheer brain-fogging boredom to type the words the
hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy into the search bar on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy, what results will this flippant tappery yield?
Firstly an animated icon appears in a flash of pixels and informs you that
there are three results. Which is confusing as there are obviously five listed
below him, numbered in the usual order.
Guide Note: That is if your understanding of the usual numerical order is from
small to large and not from derivative to inspired, as with Folfangan slugs, who
judge a number’s worth based on the artistic integrity of its shape. Folfangan
supermarket receipts are beauteous ribbons, but their economy collapses at least
once a week.
Each of these five results is a lengthy article, accompanied by many hours of
video and audio files and some dramatic reconstructions featuring quite well-
video and audio files and some dramatic reconstructions featuring quite well-
known actors.
This is not the story of those articles.
But if you scroll down past article five, ignoring the offers to remortgage
your kidneys and lengthen your pormwrangler, you will come to a line in tiny
font that reads, If you liked this, then you might also like to read…Have your
icon rub itself along this link and you will be led to a text only appendix with
absolutely no audio and not so much as a frame of video shot by a student
director who made the whole thing in his bedroom and paid his drama soc. mates
with sandwiches.
This is the story of that appendix.
S
o far as we know…The Imperial Galactic Government decided, over a bucket
of jeweled crabs one day, that a hyperspace expressway was needed in the
unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. This decision was
rushed through channels ostensibly to preempt traffic congestion in the distant
future, but actually to provide employment for a few ministers’ cousins who
were forever mooching around Government Plaza. Unfortunately the Earth was
in the path of this planned expressway, so the remorseless Vogons were
dispatched in a constructor fleet to remove the offending planet with gentle use
of thermonuclear weapons.
Two survivors managed to hitch a ride on a Vogon ship: Arthur Dent, a
young English employee of a regional radio station whose plans for the morning
did not include having his home planet blasted to dust beneath his slippers. Had
the human race held a referendum, it’s quite likely that Arthur Dent would have
been voted least suitable to carry the hopes of mankind into space. Arthur’s
university yearbook actually referred to him as “most likely to end up living in a
hole in the Scottish highlands with only the chip on his shoulder for company.”
Luckily Arthur’s Betelgeusean friend, Ford Prefect, a roving reporter for that
illustrious interstellar travel almanac The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, was
more of an optimist. Ford saw silver linings where Arthur saw only clouds, and
so between them they made one prudent space traveler, unless their travels led
them to the planet Junipella, where the clouds actually did have silver linings.
Arthur would have doubtless steered the ship straight into the nearest cloud of
gloom, and Ford would have almost certainly attempted to steal the silver, which
would have resulted in the catastrophic combustion of the natural gas inside the
lining. The explosion would have been pretty, but as a heroic ending, it would
have lacked a certain something—i.e., a hero in one piece.
The only other Earthling left alive was Tricia McMillan, or Trillian to use
her cool spacey name, a fiercely ambitious astrophysicist cum fledgling reporter
who had always believed that there was more to life than life on Earth. In spite
of this conviction, Trillian had nevertheless been amazed when she was whisked
off to the stars by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the maverick two-headed Galactic
President.
What can one say of President Beeblebrox that he has not already had
What can one say of President Beeblebrox that he has not already had
printed on T-shirts and circulated throughout the Galaxy free with every uBid
purchase?
Zaphod Says Yes to Zaphod was probably the most famous T-shirt slogan,
though not even his team of psychiatrists understood what it actually meant.
Second favorite was probably Beeblebrox. Just be glad he’s out there.
It is a universal maxim that if someone goes to the trouble of printing
something on a T-shirt, then it is almost definitely not a hundred percent untrue,
which is to say that it is more than likely fairly definitely not altogether false.
Consequentially, when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived on a planet, people
invariably said yes to whatever questions he asked and when he left they were
glad he was out there.
These less than traditional heroes were improbably drawn to each other and
embarked on a series of adventures, which mostly involved gadding around
through space and time, sitting on quantum sofas, chatting with gaseous
computers, and generally failing to find meaning or fulfillment in any corner of
the Universe.
Arthur Dent eventually returned to the hole in space where the Earth used to
be and discovered that the hole had been filled by an Earth-sized planet that
looked and behaved remarkably like Earth. In fact this planet was an Earth, just
not Arthur’s. Not this Arthur’s at any rate. Because his home planet was at the
center of a plural zone, the Arthur we are concerned with had found himself
shuffled along the dimensional axis to an Earth that had never been destroyed by
Vogons. This rather made our Arthur’s day, and his usually pessimistic mood
was further improved when he encountered Fenchurch, his soul mate. Luckily
this idyllic period was not cut short by Arthur and Fenchurch bumping into any
alternate universe Arthurs who may have been wandering around, possibly in
Los Angeles working for the BBC.
Arthur and his true love traveled the stars together until Fenchurch vanished
in mid-conversation during a hyperspace jump. Arthur searched the Universe for
her, paying his way by exchanging bodily fluids for first-class tickets.
Eventually he was stranded on the planet Lamuella and made a life for himself
there as sandwich maker for a primitive tribe who believed that sandwiches were
pretty hot stuff.
His tranquillity was disturbed by the arrival of a couriered box from Ford
Prefect, which contained the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Mark II in the
form of a smarmy pan-dimensional black bird. Trillian, who was now a
successful newswoman, had a delivery of her own for Arthur in the shape of
Random Dent, the daughter conceived with the donated price of seat 2D on the
Alpha Centauri red-eye.
